did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

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did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by dragonmagico » Wed May 25, 2022 12:24 pm

He plagiarized some big name rock bands, and for a good stretch of time the easiest way to get into dragon ball (z) especially for younger kids was the video games with said plagiarized music.

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by jjgp1112 » Wed May 25, 2022 1:06 pm

That predated the video games. Funimation marketed Dragon Ball Z with rock music during the first run, notably filling the soudntracks for Movies 4, 5, and 8 with metal bands.

Coincidentally, one of the songs Yamamoto plagiarized in Budokai 3 was a song FUNimation actually used in Movie 5 (Cooler's Revenge) two years earlier :lol:

Disturbed - The Game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xO-RsILjIfE

The main rif became Ultimatum, the song used for Planet Namek and plays when you fight Cooler in the story mode :lol: :lol: :lol: :lol:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uYBc7eyMc6U

And the intro became Twist of Fate:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7z2PXI2 ... C&index=11
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by MasenkoHA » Wed May 25, 2022 1:42 pm

Kind of feels like the association of DBZ with rock and nu metal was more a Funi thing.

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by Anonymous Friend » Wed May 25, 2022 6:09 pm

Has Yamamoto ever made any comments regarding what happened?

With other acts, like Vanilla Ice, I can get how they may not have thought it was plagerizing. Or may have sub consciencely been doing it. Isn't there a Camila Canbena song that got sued, and the group was somewhat obscure. Some one may have heard the song, and when making the new song didn't realize the melody was coming from a memory. It turns out the accusing band plagerized the song from a ifferent group whithout them knowing.

Yamamoto, though, had a slew of songs he stole from.
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by TheGreatness25 » Wed May 25, 2022 6:45 pm

I honestly don't even know if Funimation was to blame for associating DBZ with rock music, to be honest. Other than the opening--which, say what you will, that beat was dope--the soundtrack was more... I don't even know what genre I'd put it at, almost dark and spooky. But it certainly wasn't rock. Even in promotional material, while they went all hard and amped up, the music wasn't really rock.

I think that the association was a product of the time. Linkin Park was huge at the time and really was the most mainstream rock band in the US. They were different and more amped to and definitely fit DBZ much closer than other mainstream genres. So, people would make music videos of DBZ to Linkin Park and other mainstream rock songs way before Funimation even thought to put some in the movies.

At least, that's how I view it--I could be wrong.

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by Adamant » Wed May 25, 2022 7:16 pm

I don't think this mentality actually EXISTS outside of weird Funiball dubbies stuck in the past, so...no, not really. Music-wise, DBZ is almost 100% associated with Kageyama and Kikuchi.
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by MasenkoHA » Wed May 25, 2022 7:26 pm

TheGreatness25 wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 6:45 pm I honestly don't even know if Funimation was to blame for associating DBZ with rock music
They are. Between Rock the Dragon, a lot of the Cakemix studios stuff, and all the bands Funimation licensed for movied 4,5,8 and the two tv specials

I'd put it at, almost dark and spooky
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by Masquerade » Wed May 25, 2022 8:31 pm

Yamamoto's career with DBZ practically started by ripping of both Propaganda's "The Murder Of Love" and "P-Machinery" for Trunks' theme.

I wish more of the JPN OST sounded like that LOL.
MasenkoHA wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 7:26 pm
I'd put it at, almost dark and spooky
Lolwut
Faulconer soundtrack was very "Tubular Bells-ish" a decent chunk of the time and used the harmonic minor scale a lot, so there's that.

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by DBZAOTA482 » Thu May 26, 2022 8:53 am

It's more of a FUNimation thing like others said. Yamamoto's music for the franchise was always a mix of different genres including orchestras like originally intended for Dragon Ball.
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by TheGreatness25 » Thu May 26, 2022 11:21 am

MasenkoHA wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 7:26 pm
TheGreatness25 wrote: Wed May 25, 2022 6:45 pm I honestly don't even know if Funimation was to blame for associating DBZ with rock music
They are. Between Rock the Dragon, a lot of the Cakemix studios stuff, and all the bands Funimation licensed for movied 4,5,8 and the two tv specials
I feel like DBZ's association particularly with Linkin Park (to the one where people claimed that Linkin Park had something to do with "Rock the Dragon") was well before Cakemix and the movies.

I'd put it at, almost dark and spooky
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How do would you describe the Shuki Levy Z score? Lol Maybe "dark and dreary" rather than "spooky." But certainly not rock (other than the intro).

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by MasenkoHA » Thu May 26, 2022 11:56 am

TheGreatness25 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 11:21 am


I feel like DBZ's association particularly with Linkin Park (to the one where people claimed that Linkin Park had something to do with "Rock the Dragon") was well before Cakemix and the movies.
I'm 99.9999 percent sure the association with Linkin Park happened after the CakeMix studios score had taken over.

ETA: 100 percent sure now that I double checked when In the End and Crawling came out.


I don't know if the Linkinball Z AMV craze happened before or after any of the movies were released but considering Lord Slug, the Trunks special, and Bardock special were all dubbed in 2000 I have my doubt Funimation made those decision based on that trend. Especially since they never licensed any Linkin park music

How do would you describe the Shuki Levy Z score? Lol
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by Dragon Ball Ireland » Thu May 26, 2022 12:25 pm

As far as I can tell Linkin Park weren't that well known before the Faulconer Productions score came onto the scene. I remember a lot of people talking about Linkin Park around 2006/7, but don't recall hearing about them any earlier than that. Suffice to say there was a period when a lot of music from the time was being shared between people on services like Napster, much of which was done without crediting the sources, leading to some misinformation spreading. Among these audio files being shared were tagless versions of Rock the Dragon without any of the associated metadata. What didn't help was happening at the peak of Linkin Park's popularity and coincided with large numbers of fan-made Dragon Ball music videos using their songs, so a lot of fans just assumed it was their song.
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by jjgp1112 » Thu May 26, 2022 12:27 pm

Dragon Ball Ireland wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:25 pm As far as I can tell Linkin Park weren't that well known before the Faulconer Productions score came onto the scene. I remember a lot of people talking about Linkin Park around 2006/7, but don't recall hearing about them any earlier than that.
Were you just really young or living under a ROCK????? Linkin Park was HUGE in 2000, had the best selling album of 2001, and you couldn't go on Morpheus or Kazaa without finding a septillion amount of Linkin Park/DBZ AMVs.

Edit: I see you're not from America which is a little more justifiable, but even so...
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by MasenkoHA » Thu May 26, 2022 12:30 pm

Dragon Ball Ireland wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:25 pm As far as I can tell Linkin Park weren't that well known before the Faulconer Productions score came onto the scene. I remember a lot of people talking about Linkin Park around 2006/7, but don't recall hearing about them any earlier than that.
They were definitely big long before 2006. But their big hits came out after season 3 and a lot of the AMV seems heavily built around the Cell saga (i.e Future Trunks and Super Saiyan Vegeta and Vegeta in that rain scene tended to show up A LOT)

Ninja'd by Jjgp but yeah there's no way you could escape Linkin Park at the turn of the millennium

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by Dragon Ball Ireland » Thu May 26, 2022 12:31 pm

jjgp1112 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:27 pm
Dragon Ball Ireland wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:25 pm As far as I can tell Linkin Park weren't that well known before the Faulconer Productions score came onto the scene. I remember a lot of people talking about Linkin Park around 2006/7, but don't recall hearing about them any earlier than that.
Were you just really young or living under a ROCK????? Linkin Park was HUGE in 2000, had the best selling album of 2001, and you couldn't go on Morpheus or Kazaa without finding a septillion amount of Linkin Park/DBZ AMVs.
I was 9, so Linkin Park probably weren't as big with my age group at the time. No one I knew was aware of them at the time, at least as far as I could tell. When I was a teenager, around the time Minutes to Midnight was released I knew a hell of a lot of people who were into them, including myself.
Last edited by Dragon Ball Ireland on Thu May 26, 2022 12:32 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by jjgp1112 » Thu May 26, 2022 12:31 pm

TheGreatness25 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 11:21 am
I feel like DBZ's association particularly with Linkin Park (to the one where people claimed that Linkin Park had something to do with "Rock the Dragon") was well before Cakemix and the movies.

Linkin Park only had a demo tape and an EP that wasn't known to anyone outside of the California rock scene when the in-house dub first started in 1999, so I doubt it. Hell, i don't even think they were called Linkin Park at that point!
Dragon Ball Ireland wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:31 pm
jjgp1112 wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:27 pm
Dragon Ball Ireland wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 12:25 pm As far as I can tell Linkin Park weren't that well known before the Faulconer Productions score came onto the scene. I remember a lot of people talking about Linkin Park around 2006/7, but don't recall hearing about them any earlier than that.
Were you just really young or living under a ROCK????? Linkin Park was HUGE in 2000, had the best selling album of 2001, and you couldn't go on Morpheus or Kazaa without finding a septillion amount of Linkin Park/DBZ AMVs.
I was 9, so Linkin Park probably weren't as big with my age group at the time. When I was a teenager, around the time Minutes to Midnight was released I knew a hell of a lot of people who were into them, including myself.
C'mon man, we're the same age! That's even worse! :P
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by TheGreatness25 » Thu May 26, 2022 12:41 pm

Heh. I stand corrected. Alright, I guess it was Funimation. I really tried hard to get them out of the weeds, but hey lol

Though, I did always feel like the Faulconer score felt a lot like Yamamoto's score for the Super Butōden, Ultimate Battle 22, and The Great Dragon Ball Legend scores. I feel like I could almost make parallels sometimes between the Great Dragon Ball Legend and Faulconer scores. Certainly felt closer to Yamamoto's video game work than Kikuchi's or even Shuki Levy.

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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by VegettoEX » Thu May 26, 2022 1:56 pm

Phew. OK. Lots of good info, lots of misremembering, and a fair bit of "pretty close but not quite". Let's see what I can do!

Old man history mode: ENGAGE.

Perhaps the most notable anime film with replacement rock music is Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie, which hit American home video in 1995 with songs from KMFDM, Korn, Alice in Chains, etc.

Later came Tekken: The Motion Picture, which hit American home video in 1998 with replacement songs by Stabbing Westward, Offspring, etc. At this point, just a few years later, the movie itself but especially the replacement soundtrack was already seen as passé and failing to capitalize on what the SF2 movie had done years prior.

Meanwhile, there is of course the Pokemon franchise on the children's side of things doing its own thing with replacement music, but notably creating entirely new image and insert songs for the English version. This was up through and including stuff for the first Mewtwo movie for its 1999 American release, and things like the 2.B.A. Master CD release that same year, I believe.

Going off that for kids' anime programming and specifically broadcast on TV (but shows not to the level that Pokemon would hit), we have to jet past what had already been done for years with things like Tekkeman Blade and Macross with their American reversionings, and jump ahead (backward? where are we in this history, again?) to Sailor Moon, which debuted in America in 1995. It mirrored what DB did that same year (and DBZ would do the following year) with a total replacement soundtrack, but it also did the "let's create our own original vocal songs" thing. Tons of insert songs in the show itself (either replacing ones originally there in Japanese, or inserting their own)... songs like "My Only Love" and "Carry On".

So here we have replacement soundtracks being pretty standard fare, rock replacement soundtracks coming and going REAL fast and that basically being a done thing by 1998...

... and here comes FUNimation in goddamn 2001 with "Lord Slug" and "real band" replacement music.

"Late the party" doesn't even begin to accurately convey the reality of the day.

BUT!

BUT BUT BUT.

They were late to the party on the production side, but fairly timely BY TOTAL COINCIDENCE in the mainstream cultural reflection.

Lord Rae released his "Trunks Tribute" AMV with Linkin Park's "With You" in January 2001. This is the first notable "Linkin Ball Z" AMV. This was it, my dudes and dudettes. This is the one that kicked it off. You've got hundreds of thousands of new middle school kids discovering DBZ on TV after school, discovering nu-metal at the same time, and FUNimation just coincidentally tripping and falling into it with a "hello fellow children" attitude. They all naturally said "what if we combined these two things?"

(And it's of course worth noting here that once Barry Watson was gone from FUNimation post-GT... all of that nonsense suddenly stopped, and FUNimation matched the rest of the industry in production style.)

With that all said, I think it's fair to want to bring up the Kenji Yamamoto connection and compare his work with what was being done in the replacement soundtracks... but I just don't think that it's ultimately relevant. Yamamoto was genuinely doing something new and interesting with every. single. next. game. that. came. out. You go from orchestral to techno to experimental to rock and back around again even within the same generation and series of games. You can pluck any given song out of his catalog and find something to approximate it with over in FUNimation's catalog, because both of them were throwing every shit they crapped at the wall to see what would stick (some to greater success than the other).
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by jjgp1112 » Thu May 26, 2022 2:04 pm

(Sidebar: I always find it weird that Linkin Park got lumped in with the rest of the nu-metal phase. They only fit in the shallowest of ways. Stylistically and especially aesthetically they were way different from the "bastardized Rage Against the Machine" ways of the remaining bunch)
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Bulma: Of course! I'm not gonna pull a Frieza and screw it up!
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Re: did Yamamoto's plagiarism contribute to the dbz = rock music mentality?

Post by Grimlock » Thu May 26, 2022 2:18 pm

VegettoEX wrote: Thu May 26, 2022 1:56 pmLord Rae released his "Trunks Tribute" AMV with Linkin Park's "With You" in January 2001. This is the first notable "Linkin Ball Z" AMV. This was it, my dudes and dudettes. This is the one that kicked it off.
I just want to say that it brings me an immense deal of joy that Linkin Park is in some way, shape or form connected to Dragon Ball's history/franchise (internationally, as these AMVs are quite popular, or at least I can certainly say that's the case where I live, there were many, many videos by the time I started using Internet) that we can document and talk about. :)

Anyway, to bring this more on-topic, do we have any information or anything of sorts about a song by Linkin Park specifically that was plagiarized and used in a Dragon Ball material?
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